


little boy lost, little boy found

by ninemoons42



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Children, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Bullying, Day Off, Domestic Fluff, East Village, F/M, Fever, Field Trip, Found Family, Gen, Harm to Children, Homework, Katz's Deli, Memories, Memory Loss, Minor Anti-Semitism References, Minor Holocaust References, New York City, POV Outsider, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Sexism, Sewing, Sexist Language, Strand Bookstore, Tea, The Jarvises Adopt Charles Xavier, Time-Shifted Charles Xavier, Tompkins Square Park, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-10 18:47:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 9,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3299930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy Carter's out saving the world with Edwin Jarvis backing her up, and Edwin goes home to his Anna, and what if in some other place and time there was a blue-eyed boy in that home?</p><p>(Or: the AU in which a little boy version of Charles Xavier finds himself getting taken in by the Jarvises and the most fantastic honorary aunt ever.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. sugar cubes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aesc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesc/gifts), [baehj2915](https://archiveofourown.org/users/baehj2915/gifts), [afrocurl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrocurl/gifts).



> This all came about because of friends in the XMFC fandom. See [HERE](http://theletteraesc.tumblr.com/post/110123768690/i-have-been-thinking-of-bb-charles-meeting-peggy) for the first spark of inspiration.
> 
> (And this is how I went back to writing Charles Xavier. :D ♥)

Bills and more bills, a stray postcard from some brief interlude of upstairs-bedroom entertainment, and a few pieces of junk mail: the postman’s offerings were meagre and uninteresting and Edwin Jarvis dispatched the opened envelopes and their contents as speedily as he could, winnowing down to the bottom of the pile, where - 

Where a piece of familiar stationery had been lying in wait for him. Engraved paper that could only have come from one of the studies near the kitchen - one of the _opened_ studies near the kitchen, unlocked and aired and with fresh new curtains hung, because it had recently come back into use, because - 

Engraved paper, and instead of elegant looping ink - elegant looping _crayon_. A tasteful dark indigo, and the still-unfamiliar reek of wax and pigment. Uncertain lines. The boy needed a little practice - and unlike children his age, did seem like the type to enjoy the practice. _You are invited to tea with Master Charles Xavier. (Morning.)_

Edwin smiled, and ran fingertips over the loops and whorls of boyish handwriting. He carefully folded that piece of paper up and tucked it away in the pocket of his suit jacket. Anna would coo over it and likely pin it someplace safe, and that was the right thing to be doing, with a note like this.

He felt lighter, strangely, as he retraced his steps and made his way back into the depths of the mansion. A door, ajar, and a clumsily made-up bed, seemingly far too large for the boy who’d come to him and to Anna and to Miss Peggy as well, friendless and alone and too starched-and-pressed in his little mourning suit. A scatter of books and the waft of fresh flowers. Anna’s lilies, Edwin thought, and hurried on.

The sunroom was opened almost entirely onto one of the informal gardens and there was a table tucked away into a shady corner. The heavy tea service, but the sturdy clay cups, and Charles Xavier was standing next to the table, tucking a sugar cube into his cheek.


	2. hold on, child, hold on

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So everyone’s talking about vaccinations (please vaccinate your kids) and I went and looked up the MMR vaccine and - well. Scientists succeeded in isolating the measles virus and turning it into a vaccine in 1963 [[source](http://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html)]; before that, “nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years of age” [same source as above]. And that’s just in the USA. So this is the germ - excuse me - of this story.

The night was pressing down on him. Oppressive. A weight on his shoulders and a lump in his throat. There was a headache sitting somewhere near the top of his head, raptor-pain and a heavy perch, and he made himself release his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. It wouldn’t do to seem to lose composure, not now - 

Movement. Another worried face. Peggy Carter’s eyebrows had been drawn in with shaking hands. He could see the crooks and the creases. 

She closed the door and put her seat belt on. A sigh. “How is he?”

Edwin Jarvis took a deep breath. It didn’t dislodge the pain. Just moved it around a little. “His fever is - rising. I trust Anna to take him to the hospital. It could happen tonight. Or it might not happen at all.”

He watched Peggy set her mouth in a firm line. “Then let’s be about tonight’s business. And then tomorrow we will sit with him. We’ll look after him.”

Edwin wanted to say something, and found his words burnt away in worry and a little boy’s delirium - nothing else he could do - he turned the key, revved the engine. The roar of the car washed away the worries, just for a moment.

///

It started with a nearly inaudible sob. With red eyes.

Anna Jarvis set her needle and thread aside, set the buttons and her Edwin’s waistcoat back down, and hurried across the corridor. Hot hands and hunched shoulders. The little boy in the bed seemed even smaller as he tried to hold back his tears.

“ _Fiam,_ ” she whispered, taking both of Charles Xavier’s hands. Blue eyes full of bright pain. “Tell me what is wrong,” she implored, softly.

“I don’t feel well.” Hoarse whispers. “Like one of the girls who lives next door. She looked like she wanted to cry. She was coughing all the time. She fainted.”

And Anna remembered Charles coming home, Charles with his face pinched in worry, and - something about those words was painfully familiar. The boy in her arms was all of eight years old, and the girl he was talking about was not much older. 

She knew what this was.

“Edwin,” she said, softly, the morning after Charles’s tears, Charles’s desperate fitful sleep. “You have had the measles.”

“Yes. And so have you,” was her husband’s reply.

“And so we are safe. But I forget that it is something that strikes, again and again. It does not truly go away. And to it the children are the vulnerable ones.”

Dawning comprehension and fear and sadness in his eyes. “Charles,” he whispered.

“Yes.”

///

A hospital room, and the smell of antiseptics, the hushed whispers of to-ing and fro-ing white-clad footsteps.

Peggy Carter thought she could feel fever-heat radiating from the boy in the too-large bed, and her heart ached, and she looked across, at clasped hands and Anna Jarvis whispering soothingly to her Edwin, and for a moment she saw, not Charles in the bed, but a skinny scrawny blond - 

And she heard his voice, softly, as though from close by. _Hold on. Hold him._

She sat down. Took both of Charles’s hands in her own. She would stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Hungarian word used in this story, _fiam_ , is the specific kinship term that means " **my** son".


	3. before we bless these candles

Surrounded by the forlorn murmur of the pouring rain and the bright warm sweet scent of pastries, Edwin Jarvis squinted doubtfully out the windshield of his borrowed conveyance, trying to make out the outline of the man who’d accosted him, who’d “invited” him to talk about something hazy and official and legal and falling under perhaps the general vicinity of something called the truth.

It wasn’t the first time that he’d cursed his employer in his head, and it would very likely not be the last time, and that wasn’t even counting that thrice-blasted vial of blood. 

He very much hoped that Miss Peggy had that particular item hidden away someplace safe. Edwin was no scientist and he understood the potential of that vial. He understood the complicated consequences of it. 

He was glad the vial was out of Howard Stark’s hands.

Home through stop-and-start traffic: and when he pulled in at the front door at last, there was a small blue umbrella waiting for him. A comically contrasting pair of red wellies.

A smile that chased the cold and the mist and the rain away, and Edwin couldn’t help but smile back: bright blue eyes and bright red cheeks. He could overlook the tell-tale spatters on otherwise pristine sleeves: though he worried about those stains setting in the next twenty-four hours or so, when he wouldn’t be able to start on the household wash until late the next evening.

“Hello, Charles,” he said as he opened the door, and then Charles was trying to stand on the tips of his boots, trying to raise his little umbrella high enough to go over Edwin’s hat. “No, no, no need for that, but thank you very much for trying. You might still be a little too short to hold an umbrella for me.”

Brief appearance of a pout, fleeting consternation. “I want to help.”

“That, too, is appreciated.” He took one of the boxes of pastries from the front passenger seat, keeping the rest of the things he’d bought for himself. “Come and tell me about your day. Don’t forget to wipe your boots.”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said, and Edwin let the boy push through into the house ahead of him.

Charles walked with such a serious step, such a look of concentration on his face, a stern frown directed at the box he was carrying with such delicate care. 

They were passing through one of the main dining rooms when there was a quiet rolling growl of a rumble, too close to be thunder.

Edwin thought of cleaning up the upstairs bedrooms with a perfectly straight face, and merely raised an eyebrow in Charles’s direction, when the boy looked up with the most deprived and red-faced expression.

“Ah, _there_ you are, I wondered where you had gone - and, oh, Edwin, thank you,” Anna Jarvis said as she put a fine crystal vase on the kitchen table. Bright flowers, a rain-dewed smile, and her dark hair still in the scarf she’d worn to cover it last night.

She was beautiful and she was beaming and Edwin caught her eye and flicked a look in Charles’s direction.

In response, Anna nodded and relieved the boy of his box. “Let’s see what we have - don’t those look good?” Little buns brushed with golden glaze and icing, and the spicy waft of cinnamon against the earthy rain and the insistent breeze from the gardens. “Hungry?” she asked Charles.

Charles nodded, and went to pull a chair out for himself. He was short for his age, Edwin thought, and that accounted for the laborious clambering, but there was something about the odd sizes of his feet that told Edwin the boy would grow some more, and perhaps end up as tall as his father....

Sad thoughts were not allowed, he thought, on the day of rest.

He leaned against one of the counters and watched Anna and Charles pour each other tea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have tried to be careful in writing about honoring Shabbat. Any and all mistakes are mine.


	4. too many accents

Starch, Angie Martinelli thought, starch and the many stinks of a hospital. Squeaking rubber-soled shoes. Stale coffee that was more brackish water than beans. The toe-curlingly repellent admixture of cigarette smoke and ten different kinds of antiseptic. Starched white collars and hats.

She gulped down her water, thankful that she was on break to think about these things at all, and murmured lines to the wan splash of sunlight in the bottom of the tumbler: _But few recall the Sisters, and the glory / Of women dead beneath a distant star...._

“Hey, Angie, isn’t that the guy your friend from the Griffith’s seeing?”

Angie started, and looked back over her shoulder - and Bess was pointing into the seating area with the tip of her knife, with carrot-stains all over her apron.

Angie rolled her eyes and grabbed the tip of the knife in careful fingers, lowered it back down to Bess’s cutting board. “How many times do I have to tell you, the knife is not an extension of your hand when you happen to be pointing that hand at people? You planning to put an eye out?” But she was grinning as she said it, and she was thinking of certain customers she’d thought about slapping head-first into one of the ovens, and she could see that cold gleam in her friend’s eyes, too.

“Okay, okay, sorry, I forgot, too surprised. Go talk to him. He seems to be lost.”

And Angie stuffed Vera Brittain’s poem back into her pocket and put on a smile. She wasn’t entirely sure about the man’s name - she just knew Peggy talked to him - and the man struck her as slightly lost, slightly like an angular clown in a rather fine suit - 

But then the little boy stepped out from behind the man and looked around with wide eyes, and Angie’s smile faltered, precariously, teetering off her mouth.

Because the boy looked like a little boat come unmoored, like he was still trailing off someone’s apron strings. Wide blue eyes and unruly dark hair, and unlike most kids Angie’d had the devil’s luck to know, he was completely silent: just looking around. His mouth hung open, just a little. He looked like he wanted to speak and like he couldn’t. Sparkling excitement in his face.

“Miss - er, Martinelli, I believe, is the name Miss Carter gave me.”

Angie blinked. Looked up. Blast it, but she was going to get a crick in her neck looking up at Peggy’s friend. Her words suffered slightly for her pique: “Yeah, well, it’s Angie to you if you’re a friend of English’s. Your accent’s not the same as hers.”

A diffident smile that was also a little pleased. The man followed her pointing finger, sat down in one of the cramped booths, and then the boy started and scrambled into the seat opposite. “People normally just say that I sound strange, er - Angie.”

“I’m an actress, or I want to be - I have to listen,” Angie said. “Waiting for her?”

“Yes. I’m afraid we’re a little early, however. Someone was a little excited to go on the subway.” 

And the man’s smile changed as he looked at the boy: he looked fond, suddenly, and Angie was not at all surprised when he reached across and laid a hand on the boy’s hair - but it was surprising that the boy colored and reached up to touch the man’s hand, holding it in place.

“Mister Jarvis. Master Xavier. Forgive me my lateness.” A blur of sharp suit jacket and severe skirt. Angie wanted to stare, because for once Peggy was wearing her hair tied back and out of the way: a sober black ribbon wound around and around the tail of her shining hair. 

She said, still staring, “Looking good, English.”

Was Peggy blushing? Peggy Carter didn’t blush, not her, not even when whispering about the merits of sneaking an extra serving of pie over an extra custard. “Angie,” Peggy said, warm and smiling and sweet around the edges. “I know you’re supposed to be on break, let me go and take my guests off your hands - ”

Angie blinked. Since when did Peggy know about her schedule - had she told her - she racked her brains and couldn’t come up with an answer, and she just about jumped out of her skin when there was a sudden touch to her forearm. “Whoa!”

“Sorry!” _Another_ accent, honestly, what was going on? But the little boy in his shirtsleeves and suspenders was blushing so furiously that Angie couldn’t help but bend a little, in order to look him better in the eyes. 

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” the little boy said. “I’m Charles.”

“Nice to meet you, Charles. I’m Angie.”

“Yes. I heard. It’s my first time in this part of New York City. Miss Peggy and Uncle Edwin are showing me around. I like this place. It smells nice.”

Angie couldn’t help but laugh, the boy was so earnest and sweet and polite, nothing at all brattish about him, inkstains swirling on his hands and sleeves. “I don’t know, Charles, you might change your tune if you decided to try the turkey sandwich.”

Scrunched nose. An apologetic look. “Then I would rather stick to Aunt Anna’s sandwiches, thank you.”

“Smart boy.” Angie looked at a quietly laughing Peggy. “Take him to Yonah Schimmel’s on East Houston if you have to feed him - get a potato knish, or cheese, or something.”

“I will. Come along, Charles,” Peggy said, and Angie stood stock-still as she wrapped her hand around Angie’s wrist, squeezing firmly and briefly, and when she was gone Angie felt like she’d come a little unmoored herself.

Maybe she would try saying those lines in Peggy’s accent, how hadn’t she thought of that yet, and she watched Peggy take the boy’s hand, watched the boy draw close to her and hold fast to the hem of Peggy’s jacket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem that Angie is trying to learn is _The Sisters' Graves at Lemnos_ by Vera Brittain. Link [HERE](http://lemnosgallipolicc.blogspot.com/2013/10/vera-brittain-and-lemnos-sisters-graves.html).
> 
> I picked Yonah Schimmel's, the famous knish spot, off this BuzzFeed list of [44 Amazing NYC Places That Actually Still Exist](http://www.buzzfeed.com/perpetua/amazing-nyc-places-that-actually-still-exist#.np62ZLJME). (Some of these places are old enough for Steve and Bucky to have known them from before the war.)


	5. tea for two

Deep muttering that didn’t sound like it was coming from inside the huge house that belonged to a missing man, a man who was running away, and the muttering that was thunder sounded like huge footsteps tiptoeing closer, and for a moment Charles forgot himself, forgot the solemn spaces and the shadows shivering in every corner and tripped out of bed, bare footsteps across polished floors, darting across the corridor into one of the other open rooms. Here the desks and the armchairs loomed at him but he passed them by and clambered up into a window-seat: and there were curtains upon curtains there, some heavy and some made of lace.

Charles pulled the lace curtains away and pressed his nose to the cold glass of the window. Black metal in a grid and in curves, vines climbing a - he forgot the word - a frame of some kind. Some of the bits of the window were colored, but it was too dark to see those colors now: and looking out the window, the world was colored in dark grey and blue. Flashes of light and flashes of sound: thunder and lightning above, and cars passing by below.

There was a draught coming in, and Charles curled his toes and put his arms around himself, and as quickly as he’d come into the room he made his way out. There were clothes scattered next to his bed. A shawl, hand-knitted, lopsided. He put that on first, wrapping it around his shoulders. Socks and shoes and - he opened the little cupboard next to the bed. A heap of dark green on the first shelf. Fingerless gloves, a little too large for him, but he wanted to be warm.

There was nothing to be done for his hair: Charles made terrible faces at himself in the mirror, horrible stuck-out tongue, and even pulled on his own ears and crossed his eyes at the same time. 

Somewhere in the house, as if from very far away, a door thumped shut.

Charles smiled, and plucked at his sleeves to make sure they were even, and ran all the way downstairs: from the polished floors to the carpet on the steps, brown and green and gold patterns leading towards a set of swinging doors.

A woman in a maroon coat, in a black dress. Next to her on one of the kitchen counters was a battered black hat trimmed in bright blue lace, and Charles went to get the hat and put it on: and it slipped down over his eyes, and for a moment he couldn’t see but the woman was laughing softly, and that made Charles smile.

“We’ll find you a better hat when we go shopping, _fiam_ , this one’s too large for you.” The woman’s voice was soft and sweet, and she always sounded like she was singing a song, but Charles thought that she sang sad gentle songs, or why else would Uncle Edwin look away or look down when she sang? Why else would Uncle Edwin hold the woman’s hands so tightly?

The hat was being lifted off Charles’s head and now he could reach out, and the woman smiled and kissed his cheeks, one after the other. “Hello, dear,” she said as she hung her coat and hat up.

“Hello, Aunt Anna,” Charles said, and in the distance there was more thunder, closer now.

“It seems like I got home just in time,” she said, and Charles watched her unpin the snood in which she wore her dark braided hair. “Shall we make tea?”

Charles nodded, and then scampered into the pantry: the marmalade and jam jars used to be on higher shelves and now they were just at his eye-level, just inside the doors. He brought those out and put them next to the cups that had appeared on the kitchen table. 

Next, the silver: a set of good spoons, with pretty flowers etched into the bowls. He peered at one of the spoons and pulled another face at himself, to the laughter of his Aunt Anna. 

Soon he could no longer hear the thunder for the crackling fire and the rapid burble of the boiling water in its kettle on the stove.

“I wish I could make you tea,” he said, softly, as Aunt Anna set the table. The bread and the butter within his easy reach. He spread butter onto two slices of bread, then piled marmalade onto one before piling them together. 

“I’d like that,” Aunt Anna said as she poured steaming water into the teapot and then emptied it out into the sink. He watched her hands move, spooning tea leaves from a battered-looking blue can into the teapot, and then a rush of steam and the fragrant promise of brewing as she poured the rest of the hot water in.

“Maybe when I’m older?” Charles took a bite out of his marmalade sandwich, then pushed it in her direction.

“Oh, before then, I’m sure.”

Charles smiled, and went to get the milk in its little glass bottle, cool and just a little too large for both of his hands. He wanted to grow taller and stronger and a little bit bigger. Just enough to work at the stove. Just enough to do all these things for Aunt Anna, when she came home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Repeating from Chapter Two: the Hungarian word used in this story, _fiam_ , is the specific kinship term that means " **my** son".


	6. winter encounters

The man stood on the corner of the street, and there were children hollering and shouting as they jumped over lines and squares and numbers chalked into the sidewalk, and the blue sky overhead was filled with wisps of straggling white and he thought, he’d been here before.

That door used to be red. The bars on that window were new. Why was the garden on the other street corner gone? Didn’t these children pick flowers there and learn about weeding?

The store on his left had changed. It used to sell other things; it used to have a different name.

What had the store been called? What had it sold? 

He could not remember.

A little girl jumped out of the last box that he could see, to cheers and grins, and she was dressed in trousers. Narrow, and cutting off just below her knee. Why was she wearing trousers? Who had allowed her to dress that way? 

He had to admit that it might have been easier for the girl to play - whatever game she was playing - in those trousers, when he remembered girls as they danced and ran after hoops tied in ribbons, skirts with their many-times-resewn hemlines flapping.

There were boys in the game, too, and now none of them were wearing suspenders.

He didn’t know why he remembered a scrawny boy in particular. A boy who came up, just barely, to his shoulder or so. Righteousness and fury and - 

He blinked. He shivered. He had lost the thought. He could not remember the boy. The hazy outline of a possibility of a face, gone.

He did not know why he was here.

He knew the weight of the guns in his pockets. Guns. More than one of them. 

He thought that there was a name in his mind, laboriously coalescing, up from the sludge of his muddled and cracked thoughts - but he didn’t know what the name meant - 

“Sir?”

The man looked down. 

Blue eyes.

“Hello,” said the little boy. 

The man blinked. Moved his hands out of his pockets. He did not remember reaching in, not for the guns, not for the knife that was still a phantom weight on his empty fingertips. 

The boy touched his sleeve again. “Are you all right? Do you need help?”

The man did not have an answer for him.

He stared at the freckles marching across the bridge of the boy’s nose. He stared at the shirt that was prettily creased at the shoulders, stared at the streamer of color hanging out of the boy’s pocket. Confused between a broken-edged memory of blond hair and these dark curls, he reached out, his movements slow and confused and slug-like, and touched the boy’s head.

“Are you all right, mister?”

And the man found himself replying, “I don’t know.”

A child’s frown. A child’s look of confusion. The man watched, hungrily, the parade of emotions crossing the boy’s face. Something about him was - not familiar. But something about the boy was making him think about this street, this place, full of laughter and a bright blazing fire of a boy. An Irish accent.

“Would you like to sit down?” And now the boy was standing halfway between him and a nearby stoop. In an inchoate mind, another struggling memory - he used to sit on stoops and watch boys playing stickball - he used to sit on stoops and listen to someone’s battered wireless - 

The man blinked and those memories, too, sank into deep black. Unreachable again. Numbly, he sat down with the boy.

He wanted to remember the boy, who asked no more questions. Who merely sat quietly with him, looking at pictures in a battered-looking book: the faces of the moon, and a sketch of a telescope. 

///

“Your orders are to eliminate this target. He is in New York City. Extraction will be provided.”

The Winter Soldier took the shot.

And, after, he stood on a street corner in the shadow of a building marked _New York Bell Co._

Nothing was familiar.

There was a blue-eyed boy standing across the street, the wind raking through his dark hair, staring at him - but the Soldier spared him no more than a glance as a sleek blue car rolled up to the curb and the woman inside, her shining blonde hair cascading to her shoulders, addressed him in Russian: “Well met, Soldier. I am to drive you to your next destination.”

The shock in the boy’s face - and the memory of another face, another pair of blue eyes - soon vanished in white hiss and crackling fire and icy oblivion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not putting him into the tags until the next chapter, because spoilers: but yes, that IS the Winter Soldier encountering our little Charles. Time will tell if Charles's life will be in danger, or if Charles has yet another role to play in Bucky Barnes's life.


	7. god bless the child, part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings in advance for a child who's been deliberately physically harmed.
> 
> The title of this chapter is taken from [the Billie Holiday song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKNtP1zOVHw).

Flashes of lightning illuminated the rain rushing at the windows, nearly horizontal, and Peggy Carter reached for another set of light switches, flicking them on with impatient fingers. Her eyes were riveted to the table in the briefing room. A map of Europe, and a handful of markers -- the Howling Commandos’ steady, stealthy creep towards a series of isolated villages just this side of the Russian border --

A knock on the door. “Come in,” Peggy said, and hooked a chair with her foot. Her finger on one of the markers as she sat down.

“More information from one of the other SSR outposts in Poland,” Daniel Sousa said. A sheaf of creased sheets in his hand. “Took a while to crack one of the older messages; no wonder we couldn’t make heads or tails of the recent ones.”

“Let me see.” Descriptions of people, descriptions of movements, here and there a description of a hurried meeting in the dead of the night. She thought she recognized at least one of the locations, at the very least. “Have someone look into these coordinates, please,” she said, and handed a piece of paper over. 

“Got it.” 

The phone rang, suddenly, and she watched Sousa stump two steps to the left and pick up. “Agent Sousa, SSR -- yes, she’s here -- urgent? All right.” 

Peggy got to her feet and strode towards him and took the receiver. “Agent Carter.”

“Agent Carter, hello, it’s Sarah from the switchboard. I -- well, this is a little unusual, even for me.”

“You mentioned it was urgent,” Peggy said, and when she blinked and looked down at her own feet she realized that she’d shifted as though to strike a blow, or to take one. 

“Yes. Unusual _and_ urgent. I mean -- it’s the right number, it all checks out, but the person on the other line is -- ”

A chill in her bones as she thought of Anna as she braided her hair, of Jarvis’s steady hands on a steering wheel, of Angie memorizing lines -- and she said, firmly but kindly, “Put them through, please.”

“I -- yes, Agent,” and she heard Sarah say, muffled and distant, “Caller, you’ve reached Agent Carter --” 

Peggy took a deep and steadying breath, and said it again. “Agent Carter.”

“Aunt Peggy?”

She blinked. Felt around for one of the other chairs. Sat down, slowly, expecting the chair to skitter away from beneath her. “Charles,” she said, trying to put a smile in her voice. “This is -- unexpected.”

“Uncle Edwin wanted me to remember this phone number,” Charles said, and for some reason he sounded like he was speaking much too slowly. “But he also said that I wasn’t to call unless there was an emergency.”

Even the roar of the storm outside went briefly indistinct. Peggy gripped the edge of the table with her free hand. “Where are you, Charles.”

“I -- I’m quite all right -- ”

“Not if you’re calling this number. Are you getting rained on?”

“No. But it’s kind of windy here.”

“I can hear it,” Peggy said. “Tell me where you are. I’ll come and get you.”

Halting words. Charles wasn’t very far away, and that was even more alarming, since she knew where he went to school, and -- he wasn’t there.

“No luck yet -- whoa,” Sousa said as she thrust the door open. “Going somewhere?”

Peggy took a breath and pulled herself together. “Yes.”

“In this weather?”

She smiled at him, apologetically. “Needs must. Hold the fort, please. I’ll come back as quickly as I’m able to.”

Sousa’s smile was lopsided. “Not like there’s much to do, since Jack’s flight’s gotten delayed again. We’ll be here when you get back.”

“My thanks.” She didn’t see the other agents at their desks, nor the women at the switchboard, as she put her coat on and tried to find a hardier hat.

Slippery sidewalks. The wind blew in vicious gusts that almost knocked her off her feet. Peggy gripped her umbrella tightly, and hurried toward a coffee shop about a block and a half away, and -- 

Charles’s face. A vivid blossom of blue bruise. Bright crimson on his mouth, drying to a deep brown on his collar. 

Peggy dashed the last few feet and opened her arms, and Charles fell into them, sniffling.

“Come, let’s get a coffee,” she said, when she thought she could trust her voice again. There was nothing she could do for her tears, not even to claim the rain as an excuse. 

“We are near a coffee shop,” Charles said, and now she could understand why he was speaking slowly, because he winced around every word. 

“The food is better at Angie’s.”

For that she got a watery little smile.

He seemed to cling to her hand as they fought the storm, and she was glad to hold on to him.

“This is a surprise -- Charles!”

Peggy found a smile as Angie dropped her apron and rushed towards them -- as Angie clasped her hands in both of her own, then snatched Charles away, dabbing at his face with her handkerchief.

There was a story that needed to be told, and there were things that needed to be done, but first: Peggy asked the counter for a dish of ice, and for a dish of ice cream, and her reward was the grateful look in Charles’s eyes.

_to be continued_


	8. god bless the child, part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings in advance for a child who's been deliberately physically harmed and the discussion thereof.
> 
> The title of this chapter and the previous one is taken from [the Billie Holiday song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKNtP1zOVHw).

A haphazard chorus of voices: ABCs from one room and multiplication tables from another, and Anna Jarvis wrung her hands, for a moment forgetting that she was wearing her best lace gloves, the ones she wore to temple and the ones she wore when she went out to dinner with Edwin.

The woman beside her shifted from foot to foot, took a deep breath, and looked down at the black-and-white-checkered floor. 

Anna reached out to her. “Perhaps we should not be doing things this way. We could go to the head teacher. Or speak to the children in private.”

She watched Peggy Carter shake her head and then square her shoulders, and Anna copied the movement, trying to stand up as tall and as resolutely as she could. A rough burr of emotion and memory around the edges of that accent. “This is a lesson that must be learned -- well, at the soonest,” and Anna watched as the shaded wings of memory flew through Peggy’s eyes. “I will not stand idly by and see others needlessly hurt.”

“Not just Charles,” Anna said, and understanding made her whisper. Understanding, and the stories of this woman standing next to a man who carried a shield.

“No. Not just him.”

And Anna felt that she would let neither her boy nor her friend down. “Then let us be about this task,” she said, and knocked briskly on the door.

A starched collar on the other side, the whites of the eyes behind round lenses, and a surprised squeak: “Yes?”

Anna peered past the man in the unraveling cardigan -- to Charles, who was standing at the blackboard. Squiggles and streaks of numbers and long division. He was still carrying his bruises. 

She mouthed encouragement at him: _Carry on._

And she turned to where Peggy Carter was surveying the room full of shocked blank stares and jaws hanging open, and had to admit: the woman knew how to command. 

The uniform helped.

Peggy Carter in khaki and silk, bronze pins gleaming on her lapels, and -- in a concession to the continuing rains -- a beautifully battered leather jacket. Anna felt the weight of history on her friend’s shoulders, the weight of leading and the weight of experience in mud and in dust and in rubble.

Not for the first time Anna let herself think about Peggy in Budapest -- but no, that was gone and past, and she would not have traded anything for her Edwin with those letters of transit, for her Edwin and his trials and the look in his eyes whenever he looked at her.

She waited for Charles to finish his work and then went to stand behind him, and her heart went out to him as she placed her hands on his shoulders, because he reached up to hold on to her and his hands had the desperate childish strength of relief.

Now she could hear Peggy clear her throat. “I’d like to speak to -- Reginald and to Samuel and to Kurt?”

Charles flinched at each name.

Anna bit down hard on the inside of her cheek: for each boy so named had bruised knuckles and the little beady eyes of scavengers, nipping at the heels of the pack, cutting out those they deemed weak and worthless and little more than a meal.

From the thunderclouds on Peggy’s brow she thought her friend felt the same way.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Peggy said with a cold hard little smile. “I am Peggy Carter. My companion is Anna Jarvis. I believe we would be spoken of as -- Charles Xavier’s guardians.” To the teacher, in a deliberate aside: “We are sorry, sir, that Anna’s husband could not make it today. He is presently at work. A company cannot just run itself; it must have someone competent at the wheel else all shall fail.”

It was Anna’s turn to stand straight as the teacher turned to her and began to stammer. “Your husband -- owns a company?”

“He runs it,” Anna said, and that was even the truth. Without Edwin’s steady hands Stark Industries would lurch headfirst into debt and dissolution, much like its fugitive founder.

“So now that that is out of the way -- boys, you must be wondering why we wished to speak with you,” Peggy said.

Anna hissed, softly, when she saw them cower: for the boy in her arms would never have done so. Charles had fought back; he hadn’t needed to tell the story. The injuries spoke directly to his actions.

Children though they were, they had no right to flinch away from justice.

Peggy continued to speak, but the words flew past Anna’s ears as she felt Charles begin to tremble, and she reached for his hand and held it tight.

“ -- we will be most displeased should anything happen to Charles, or to any other child for that matter,” Peggy was saying. “I would strongly suggest you keep your fists to yourself. Or it will be an interesting story I’ll have to tell your minders, your families. Don’t fall into the habit of being bullies; rather, fall into the habit of _defending_ others from bullies.”

Anna watched Peggy reach into her pocket, and knew about the photograph that she pulled out. A handful of frowns and weapons at the ready, the dust and the dirt of battle on their hands and shoes and in their eyes. “That’s what the Howling Commandos did, and do. And that includes those whom we’ve lost.”

Murmurs: _Captain America_ and _Bucky Barnes_.

And when Charles broke away to offer his hand to Peggy, Anna couldn’t begrudge him at all -- in fact, she went to follow his example, standing on Peggy’s other side. Shoring her up. Driving the point home.

“I trust that this won’t happen again,” Peggy said, and her voice was just as strong as it ever was.

Silence in the classroom.

After a moment, Anna murmured to the other two: “Shall we go home?”

“Yes, please,” Charles said.

Anna watched as Peggy pinned down the teacher with a Look, before turning away -- and she in turn stared down the boys who had hurt her Charles. She wanted to remember the looks on their faces.

_god bless the child - the end_


	9. a day in the East Village, part 1

“Are you _certain_ you’re all right with looking after Charles tomorrow?” Peggy asked, as she worked another handful of pins into her hair. 

Angie shot her the stink-eye using the mirror in the adjoining bathroom. The air was warm and smelled faintly of peaches and vanilla and -- Angie winced -- mentholated cream. Peggy really needed to stop running off her own damned feet. 

The problem was, Angie still had no idea what it was that her friend and neighbor got up to during the evenings, and sometimes during the daytime, too. Until she knew something more she could really only harangue her, maybe look after her, little by little -- 

Actually, that was a really good idea, Angie thought, and rinsed out her mouth and washed her toothbrush. “I’m pretty sure I can handle one little boy -- I mean, Charles is pretty much the perfect little gentleman, how hard can it be to spend a day in New York with him?”

“And now you’ve gone and doomed it,” Peggy laughed. “He might be the little gentleman, but that only means he’s much more underhanded at being a little boy. Which he still is, all suits and ties to the contrary.”

“He’s got style, or rather, Anna does, can’t deny that,” Angie teased as she stole a curler from Angie’s vanity. 

As Peggy rolled her eyes and passed her the bottle of rose-scented lotion Angie briefly wondered when it was that they’d gotten so comfortable with each other that they were practically going about their night-time routines in each other’s pockets, but that line of thinking went away in a hurry when Peggy groaned softly and stumbled, completely without her usual grace, the step towards the bed. “Help yourself, and then just close the doors when you’re done,” she mumbled. “Excuse me. I’m quite tired.”

Angie watched Peggy burrow into the bedclothes, watched Peggy’s shoulders rise and fall in sudden and regular rhythms, and dared to brush her fingertips against soft clean dark hair. 

“Sleep tight, English,” she whispered, and when she tiptoed back to her room she left everything in Peggy’s room exactly where she’d found it, all in order.

///

“’Lo, Charles,” Angie said the next morning, and by now the sight of Charles getting his hair ruffled by the tall angular Englishman who was one of his devoted guardians was a regular and endearing one. “’Lo, Jarvis. Leave him over there in the corner, I’ve got breakfast cooking up -- just a light one to begin with.”

“I would also like to pay for a meal as well,” Jarvis said as he mopped his forehead with an already damp handkerchief. She could almost sympathize with him -- the kitchens were just as hot as the sidewalks already were, and he had a hat to shield him from the merciless Manhattan sun.

“Help yourself,” she said, and knelt next to the seat that Charles had scrambled into. “Hey, you,” and she just barely prevented herself from ruffling the little boy’s hair as well.

“Good morning,” Charles said, and his freckled smile was the brightest thing in the automat, brighter than the chrome fittings, brighter than the washed cutlery or the polished tables. On the seat next to him was a small satchel and a cap. “I don’t have school today.”

“Must be nice to have a holiday,” Angie said. “I’ll be spending the day with you if you don’t mind. We can take a nice long walk, and I can show you a little around the East Village? It ain’t my adopted digs exactly, but -- I’m pretty familiar with the place. Sound good?”

“It sounds very good,” Charles said, nodding, overenthusiastic enough that he looked like he might tumble off his perch.

“Good. All right. Let me get you that breakfast I promised. Do you want some coffee?”

It was almost funny, the way Charles immediately looked over his shoulder -- so Angie followed suit. Peggy had arrived and was muttering at Jarvis at one of the dispensers. “Aunt Anna and Aunt Peggy say I’m not allowed to have coffee yet,” Charles confided, almost breathlessly. “They say I’m too young.”

“Kid, I started drinking coffee when I was your age,” Angie said. “Don’t think it really hurt me. But -- well, I’ll put just a little coffee in the cup and top it off with milk, how’s that? You might not like the taste of the real thing yet anyway.”

“I don’t.” And when he nodded Charles neatly confirmed her suspicion that he’d at least tried the stuff -- leading her to wonder _whose_ cup he had been drinking from. She sincerely hoped it wasn’t Peggy. The woman put terrible things in her cup and called them either coffee or tea. It must have been something from the war, she decided, and went back into the kitchen.

“Toast and a little fruit, just like you asked,” Bess said. “There was applesauce, but you didn’t say you were feeding a wee bairn, so I left that off.”

“Thanks, Bess, I owe you one,” Angie said as she went off to change back into street clothes. 

She made Charles’s cup of coffee and carried it and the plate from Bess into the main seating area, where Jarvis and Peggy were now sitting next to Charles, the three of them crammed into the tiny booth. “Now this is a sight,” Angie joked. “Or something to _hear_ at least. It’s a wonder you all understand each other.”

“I don’t have an accent,” Peggy laughed, “and neither do these two gentlemen. It’s you who’s got the accent.”

“Well I never,” Angie began, pretending to puff up, and putting on an exaggerated drawl as well.

Charles giggled.

It was very good to see him laugh.

In a few minutes the plates were clean and Peggy and Jarvis were getting to their feet -- and then Charles stood up, too, and hugged them both, latching on around Peggy’s waist and to Jarvis’s arm.

Angie swore her eyes were not watering. Maybe just a little. The heat did funny things to her eyes.

When the others were gone, she held her hand out to Charles. “Shall we?”

“Yes please,” Charles said, dimpling, and he took her hand, and held on tightly.

_to be continued_


	10. a day in the East Village, part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild trigger warnings for oblique references to the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.

“Charles?”

Angie was hemmed in on all sides by books, books, and even more books: books in precarious stacks, books in shelves all the way to the low ceiling, books in the hands of the men and women shuffling quietly -- some even reverently -- around her.

And there was not a small cloth cap among those books, nor the shadow of a moving satchel, and she looked around wildly, heart beating a mile a minute -- 

“Here,” a familiar voice said, off to the right, and above her head.

Angie hurried to the foot of the nearest staircase.

Charles blushed and looked apologetic as he got to his feet, moved one step down, and sat down again. 

There was no escaping the books here, either, and Angie wondered how the clerks kept track of one floor, let alone the others -- there had to be at least one more if Charles’s book was any indication -- sober colors, a girl in a forest on the cover, not something that would fit on the leatherbound piles and piles that she’d turned her back on.

She recovered her poise and took a deep breath, and then -- damn propriety -- she went to sit on the step above the one that Charles was currently occupying. “Look, kid, I don’t expect you to be tied to the strap of my purse all day -- just, let me know where you’re going, okay?” 

Charles nodded. He looked like a scolded puppy, all hunched shoulders, and she couldn’t help but press a quick kiss to the back of his head. “Want to read that to me? I might use it for something in the future....”

“Okay,” Charles said, and she watched him take a deep breath and begin.

///

“You’re really good at reading things,” Angie said as they waited for their turn to cross the street. Sleek automobiles brushed noisily past them, their bright metal dimmed by the clouds that had thankfully blocked out the worst of the sun’s heat and the sun’s glare. 

“I read to Aunt Anna when she’s sewing at home,” Charles said, his head craned to look up at the top of a nearby high-rise building. “I’ve never been in a thirty-floor building before.”

“I have,” Angie said, thinking about one audition or another, not all of them always ending in rejection. “The views are nice if they look out over the harbor, or even the Brooklyn Bridge. Otherwise -- well, you don’t need to get up that high to see things.”

Charles appeared to be considering that right until they crossed the street and he said, “I’m hungry.” He said it with an embarrassed little smile.

“Just in time, too, we’re here before the lunch rush,” Angie said, eyeing the sidewalk ahead.

“Where’s here?” 

“Corner of Houston and Ludlow Streets.” She pointed to the lit-up facade and the windows through which she could see people in the queue. “Ever eaten at Katz’s before?”

Charles nodded and grinned. “Sometimes Uncle Edwin brings sandwiches home so Aunt Anna doesn’t have to make dinner.”

“Hope you like pastrami and hot dogs.”

“I do!”

“Good, ’cause I plan to stuff you full,” Angie said, and then she tapped Charles on the shoulder. “Come on! Race you there!”

She took off running and didn’t care what she looked like -- she only cared that Charles was breathless with laughter as they both pulled up at the door to the deli. Red-faced and wheezing and smiling to shame the cloud-covered sun.

Angie grinned and took Charles’s hand and led him in, and took a ticket from one of the hat-wearing attendants.

Through the queue and out the door again, and Angie took a deep whiff of onion and pickle and meat and smiled. “Can’t get this kind of food anywhere else. I know a place where we can sit and enjoy our meals in peace,” she said to Charles as she steered them away from the growing crowd. “It’s kind of a walk from here, though. Do you want to eat now or later?”

“I can walk,” Charles said.

“We’ll go slow,” Angie offered.

“Okay.” After a few steps, Charles asked, “Where are we going, please?”

“Tompkins Square Park.”

She had to lead Charles past several occupied benches and by then he seemed to be flagging, the morning’s coffee finally wearing off, but Charles bit into his half of a pastrami on rye with great enthusiasm. “This is good,” he said around a mouthful of sandwich.

Angie laughed. “Good to know even your prim and proper manners fail at times.”

She watched him swallow and wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sometimes Aunt Anna scolds me for being a messy eater,” he said, mournfully. “And for playing in the mud.” A breath. “There was the time with the ink bottle, too.”

“Did you break the ink bottle or something?”

“Or something,” Charles said after another, smaller, mouthful. “I spilled most of it on one of the old desks, and used one of the dinner napkins to try and clean up.”

Angie laughed and winced in equal measure. “So, you ruined the napkin?”

“And one of my favorite shirts.”

“Poor Charles.” She threw her arm around his shoulders and pulled him close. “Who knew you couldn’t be trusted with an ink bottle?”

The response to that was Charles sprinkling crumbs from his sandwich onto her hand.

Angie laughed even louder and pinched both of Charles’s cheeks at the same time, stretching gently, until Charles giggled and tried to break away. 

There was a not-so-quiet “Ahem!” from nearby, and Angie pulled a face back at the woman who was looking disapprovingly in their direction -- the woman huffed and stumped off, looking affronted, and she turned back to Charles to see him still laughing.

“Liked that, didn’t you,” Angie joked.

Charles suddenly turned somber. “Sometimes I make faces at people who don’t like Aunt Anna. I don’t understand why they don’t like her. Is it because of her religion? But why should that make her -- bad?”

Angie frowned and took Charles’s hand, momentarily lost for words.

“I want to know more,” Charles said.

Angie unstuck her tongue, and quashed the germ of curiosity that was growing in her head. “You’re going to be ticked off at me when I say you’re really too young for that,” she said, remembering the newsreels and the pictures in the newspapers. Blue stripes and yellow stars. “ _I’m_ too young to understand it. I might never be able to.”

She watched him set his jaw, and nod.

She watched him pick at his sandwich, listless.

///

By the time they had to go back to the automat she could make Charles smile again, by telling him some little story or another from the Broadway lights.

Peggy was there to bear her up, after Jarvis led Charles away and home. “Did something happen?”

Angie leaned into the peach-and-smoke scent of her. “I forget about Anna Jarvis, sometimes, and I don’t even know how she feels, considering I saw those movies about the camps, the ovens, and I couldn’t sleep properly afterwards.”

A quiet noise next to her. “I know some part of the story. It was told to me in confidence.”

“Then you don’t have to -- ”

“No, I don’t,” Peggy continued, “but maybe, if she should have time for us, you might be able to make friends with her, as I have -- and so you might know more, and understand.” She looked out the door of the automat. “And understand Charles a little more in the process, too.”

Angie couldn’t help herself, then -- she reached for Peggy’s hand, and clung, as tightly as Charles had. Only for a moment -- people could and would talk -- and her heart beat to feel Peggy, strong yet gentle, squeezing back.

“Come by tonight,” Peggy murmured.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Angie whispered back. 

_a day in the East Village - the end_


	11. stitches

From deep inside the house Charles could hear the hum of music: the gramophone was in use and that meant one thing, one thing that made him smile, and conscientiously wipe his shoes several times on the mat just inside the door. School-jacket and hat off and onto the stand next to the table where there was a dish for keys and pocket change.

He took his bag upstairs and retrieved his arithmetic workbook and the small tablet in which he was supposed to practice his penmanship, and came back down with one pencil stuck behind his ear and another in his pocket, and tiptoed through the mostly silent house to the workroom on the second floor.

Blue skirts and delicate lace, and a snood to catch long dark hair, and the quiet song of his Aunt Anna: and more than that, the flash of her needle as she sewed. 

“I’m home,” Charles said, softly, and that needle paused, and the woman who held it so delicately looked up from the rich dark green material that was spread out on the table.

“Welcome back,” Aunt Anna said, and she beckoned him closer with her free hand.

Charles smiled and went to her, put his arms around her shoulders and laid his cheek next to hers. She was warm and she was smiling, and she hummed appreciatively at him as she kissed his temple.

Her touch was cool and soothing and it chased away the ache in his head. 

“How was school today?”

Charles made a face, just for a moment, and he tried to look disgusted and got a laugh for his efforts. “I don’t like times tables.”

It was her turn to make a face. “Ah, you are working on those? What terrible things they are. But they are useful and you will be glad to remember them, so there is nothing for it but to know them.”

“It’s so hard,” Charles all but whined as he laid out his things. Before sitting down at the other end of the table he opened his workbook and showed her the page that he was working on. “So many numbers -- ”

“Numbers that you will need, dear. Trust me on that.”

Charles pulled another face and sat down to work -- or at least he meant to work, but then Aunt Anna rose and took the dark green cloth with her, and moved to the other table, on which was perched her sewing machine: a sleek black thing decorated with golden leaves and vines. 

There was something very soothing about the rat-tat-tat and whirr of its movement: the up-and-down dance of the needle, the spinning of the thread and its -- he tried to remember the right word -- the spool on which it was wound.

“Spool.” He said the word softly to himself, but not softly enough -- for Aunt Anna looked up from the sewing and motioned him closer.

“You see there are two places for the thread to come from: the spool here and the bobbin here,” she said, working the wheel to carefully pull the needle up from its steady stitching. “With the needle those two threads come together, to create the stitches I need on this piece of cloth.”

“What are you making?” Charles asked.

“It will be a skirt. One of the neighbors is going to a wedding and wants something nice to wear, because she will be a witness, and she wants to look elegant for the occasion.”

“Elegant,” Charles parroted. “I like the sound of that word.”

“And I think you will like the look of it, as well, because it describes something that is stylish and pleasant to look at. Something graceful.”

“That sounds like you,” Charles said, and grinned when Aunt Anna laughed and patted his cheek. 

“You are a little flatterer, my boy, and these old cheeks and these old hands are much grateful.”

Charles shook his head -- he didn’t think she looked old, despite the occasional white strand in her hair -- and went back to his schoolwork -- but every now and then he would watch his aunt as she kept sewing, as she kept humming, and the gramophone continued its gentle song.


	12. growing pains

“It is strange, that he tosses and turns in his sleep so,” Anna Jarvis murmurs, one night.

Charles had been sent home from school with a high fever, almost as high as that of a teething baby.

He had been complaining of headaches, too, some intense and some mild, sometimes enough to leave him stumbling and shambling around the house and sometimes going away with just the application of a small cloth soaked in ice water.

Edwin looked helplessly at his wife and at his ward, at the tray in his hands full of cool things, things meant to give relief: a dish of ice cream, a chocolate bar, a bowl full of ice cubes, a glass full of cold water.

A bottle of aspirin.

“Do you think he might sleep better if we made him eat and then gave him some medicine?”

“He has not had an appetite all day long.” Anna shook her head. “He was listless at breakfast. Edwin, I worry. This is most like the time that he was afflicted with the measles.”

“I know. We should bring him to the doctor in the morning -- or you should, my heart. I do not know what is in store for me this evening.”

“You and your work with Peggy, yes, I do not forget, my heart,” Anna said.

There was a voice in her head, then, and it sounded like someone calling her name, and like the boy in the bed that was far too large -- and she took the tray from her Edwin’s hands and took it to Charles, offering him cool things, and the boy’s eyes were huge and alight with fever and she prayed, earnestly, that all would be well in the morning.


	13. a visitor to the Griffith Hotel

Midmorning. The soft chime of the front-desk bell.

Miriam Fry adjusted her spectacles and glanced at herself in the mirror. Everything in place, like carefully tailored armor, like defenses elegantly stitched together -- she pulled carefully at her pearl necklace and at her matching earrings. She would have to out some more lipstick on as soon as this -- encounter -- was over. No doubt there was a man come a-visiting on a Saturday morning, trying to entice the poor girls under her care into a night and a lifetime of pain and suffering, the sweet little brainless ones having no other recourse but Miriam Fry’s diligence --

“Good morning,” she said, in a voice that should have turned the spring morning into winter’s heart -- and then she blinked, because -- 

No one at the desk?

A bobbing motion, a shock of dark brown hair -- 

“Good morning,” said the little boy at the front desk. A bundle of violets in one chubby hand. “I -- I’m here to see Miss Carter.”

“We do have a Margaret Carter living here.” Miriam Fry eyed the little boy warily. “Have you come here alone?” 

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You came here from your home by yourself?”

Another bob. The boy scrunched up his face and moved his free hand upwards, as if to touch his hair or his head, though he pulled that hand down before making contact. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you have a companion waiting outside for you?”

“No, ma’am.”

She was not satisfied -- who knew what this little boy already knew of the subtle insidious arts of charming young pretty twittering girls -- but he looked so guileless, too, standing there in the sunlight with his suspenders and his short trousers. “Very well, I shall call her,” Miriam Fry said. “But the rules of the house must be strictly followed. You are not to ascend any stairs. Any interaction you wish to conduct with our Miss Carter must take place here, in the lobby or in the dining area.”

“Oh, there’s no need for that, ma’am,” came a new voice. Not Miss Carter’s. 

It was Miss Martinelli, smiling warmly, her hair still up in curlers -- how scandalous! 

And Miriam Fry stared disapprovingly as Miss Martinelli sailed right to the boy and put her hand on his head and gave his hair a thorough ruffling. “Hello, Charles, Peggy’ll be right down, I had to kick her right out of bed, the lazybones.”

Charles, for that was apparently the boy’s name, smiled shyly back. “Did you sing to her?”

“I most certainly did,” Miss Martinelli said. 

And then Miss Martinelli turned and said, touching her hair quite without any self-conscious look in her eyes, “I’ll just take him off your hands -- he and I can wait in the lobby.”

“See that he does not go upstairs,” Miriam Fry said, narrowing her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> I am also on [tumblr](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/).


End file.
